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Spinach Sauce, for Boiled Fowls, Etc
Wash the spinach in two or three waters. Pick the leaves from the stalks, drain them, and stew them with as much water only as will keep them from burning. Squeeze the moisture from them, and beat with a wooden spoon till smooth. Dissolve a slice of fresh butter in a saucepan, put in the spinach, and stir it till it is quite hot and dry. Add pepper and salt and as much boiling milk as will make the sauce of the consistency of thick cream. Stir till smooth, and serve very hot. Time to stew, about ten minutes.
A green sauce built the old way: spinach cooked in its own moisture, pounded smooth, then loosened with hot milk. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes.
- Keep the pan dryThe hinge is the stage after squeezing: the spinach must be stirred in butter until it is genuinely hot and dry before any milk goes in. Wet spinach thins the sauce, and it is hard to bring back without either cooking it down further or adding flour.
- QuantitiesNone are given. A generous 1 lb of spinach cooks down to roughly a cup of purée, which with 1 oz butter and about 1/2 cup boiling milk makes enough sauce for four. Baby spinach needs no stalk-picking; mature bunch spinach does.
- "A slice of fresh butter"An informal Victorian measure, roughly 1 to 2 oz. "Fresh" means unsalted, as against the heavily salted keeping butter of the period, so salt to taste at the end.
- Ten minutes is longModern spinach collapses in two or three minutes in a covered pan with only the water clinging to the leaves. Longer cooking dulls the colour toward olive.
- Wash it properlyTwo or three changes of water is not fussiness — bunch spinach carries grit that a single rinse leaves behind, and grit in a purée cannot be recovered.
- Smooth without a mortarThe recipe asks for the spinach to be beaten smooth with a wooden spoon, which in practice gives a coarser texture than pounding. A food processor or a pass through a sieve gives the fine cream-like body if you want it.
- Milk must be boilingCold milk added to hot spinach drops the temperature and the sauce needs reheating, which costs colour. Scald it separately and add it in stages until the sauce coats a spoon like thick cream.
- ServingIntended as a hot sauce spooned around or over boiled poultry, and also good with poached eggs or boiled bacon. It does not hold; make it while the fowl rests.
Spinach sauces of this kind belong to the English tradition of serving boiled fowl with something green to relieve the blandness of the bird — the same impulse behind parsley sauce and the older sorrel purees. It is one of a family of vegetable puree sauces thickened by the vegetable itself rather than by a roux. The instruction to beat the spinach with a wooden spoon rather than pound it in a mortar suggests a plain household sauce rather than a kitchen-brigade one. Boiled fowl was standard invalid and family fare in the late nineteenth century, when a hen past laying went into the pot rather than the oven, and a hot green sauce did a good deal to make it worth eating.